Go Ask Grandma: How To Design For “Normals”

Comment

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal (@nireyal) and Katy Fike, PhD (@innovate50). Katy is a gerontologist and partner at Innovate50 while Nir is a founder of two startups and blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com.

As web watchers, entrepreneurs, and investors search for the next big thing, they’d be wise to focus on innovations that can be easily adopted by technology novices. A recent string of companies, including Groupon and Pinterest, have found success outside the early-adopter digerati by building products simple enough to be used by just about anyone.

Designing with tech novices in mind can mean the difference between staying niche and going mainstream. Here are three principles for designing software for people Silicon Valley too often disparagingly calls “normals.”

1. What’s it for?

Don’t tell them “how it works” or “what it is” and certainly don’t tell them how wonderful your company is. Just tell them in big, uncluttered, blatantly obvious terms what your service is for. Novice users need to know when your service would be useful in their lives.

Take a look at Twitter’s homepage for new users. It says simply, “Welcome to Twitter. Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.” Same story at Facebook. “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Brilliant! Now the tech novice knows, in no uncertain terms, when and why these sites would be useful. Twitter is for knowing what’s happening and Facebook is for connecting and sharing.

2. Where Do I Push?

We know what you’re thinking. “Sure, Facebook and Twitter can use one-sentence taglines because new users come to their sites having heard all about them already.” Well yes, but that’s the point. Most people today hear about sites from someone else. Your job is to help them fulfill the expectations they have for your service as quickly, and convincingly, as possible.

But how do you help new users fall in love with your site? Take them on a romantic walk. Software should provide a guided path, like a pleasant stroll, where users enjoy the experience of learning what the service can do for them. Too many companies dump new users on the site after registration, expecting them to fend for themselves and figure out what to do next. Instead, think of your new users as dating your site and guide them through a graceful, intuitive, and delightful get-to-know-you process. For technology novices, learning to initiate, navigate, and personalize the experience is particularly important. Novices also appreciate a tolerance for error; actions should not feel risky or permanent, but rather fluid and easy to undo if necessary.

For example, when Twitter’s exemplary on-boarding teaches new users how to use the service, it also asks about their interests and immediately uses this information to curate and personalize the experience. During the process, irrelevant functionality is disabled so that the user is guided by just a handful of clearly labeled potential actions.

3. Solo But Not Alone

Too often sites ask users to log-in with their Facebook credentials before earning their trust. Doing so may disaffect novice and experienced users alike. Many novice web users have novice web friends and may not have many contacts online. Others would like to connect with new people outside of Facebook or *gasp* prefer not have a Facebook account at all. On the other end of the spectrum, members of the tech-savvy crowd are shying away from using the Facebook log-in for third party sites, as they become increasingly wary of yet another app threatening to spam their friends. In both use cases, when a site forces users to create an account or log-in with Facebook before they are sure they want to use the service, it risks losing them for good.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t give users the option of logging in with Facebook eventually — we’re just advocating for making them fall in love with you first. Websites should be valuable and engaging to new users before they sign up for an account and even if none of their friends have joined. For example, Pinterest allows unregistered users to browse freely before creating an account. Users are asked to log-in with Facebook only after they decide they want in. And even after they join they can start re-pinning, liking, and commenting right away, with or without their friends joining the service.

Go Ask Grandma

Certainly, having a particular user in mind is key to designing products to fit their specific needs. However, even if your target user is not a web novice, ensuring that your site is usable by even the least experienced visitor will pay off. Everyone appreciates an intuitive interface, one that anticipates the user’s next step. To take a product into the mainstream, it must be simple. It must cater to people who don’t care what the technology can do, just that it can get their job done.

This is where large, yet untapped, opportunities still lay waiting for entrepreneurs who can build simple solutions to overly complex problems. A good relationship with Grandma and Grandpa might help, too.

[image via YouTube/minder213]

More TechCrunch

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

13 hours ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?